1 a vizier's daughter - Hazara.net

189
A VIZIER’S DAUGHTER – A TALE OF THE HAZARA WAR
tending the great gentle cows and oxen, the sheep and the camels –
discontented, refractory creatures that they were. She thought of the
little sister that She had pared from with such a pang, and thanked God
from her heart that He had taken her. What would have become of her
had she lived to reach her destination? Where would she have been
now? It was impossible to tell. She preferred to think of her in the
grave on the hillside in the country that might now be incorporated
with Afghanistan, but which still seemed different to the poor exile,
because it was the home of her birth and of her ancestors.
Of Fatma she had often heard, she was quite happ y. She was a girl who
had never asked much of life, and who had not fretted over her loss of
libert y. She was a slave still, but a favourite, and had a son, which
gave her a certain position in her master’s household, quite enough to
satisfy her. But still Gul Begum was glad the little sister she had loved
so dearly had not shared that fate. A slave’s life in Kabul was not
necessarily an unhappy one – the girl knew that. On the contrar y, in a
small house, if the wife were old she often had a much better time than
her mistress – more freedom, better treatment, and less responsibilit y.
In a large establishment where there were many wives, it depended
very much on the girl herself what her position would be. She might be
a wretched, slatternly drudge like Gulsum, hustled hither and thither at
every one’s beck and call, or she might be the attendant of the chief
wife, and as such, if the lady were laz y and apathetic, as most great
Afghan ladies are, would hold almost the same position that Gul
Begum herself occupied. These things depended very much on luck, but
a good deal on the girl herself.
She wondered how it had fared with her brother, the one she had helped
to save the night she had been inspired in that strange dream about the
fire. Did he ever think of her or remember her? How could he? He had
been such a child at the time, and it was now four long years since the y
had been parted. “Only m y father can miss me much,” she thought,
“and if I were with him I might even be a burden to him now he has no
home!”
The wasps and hornets droned in dozens in the room where the girl sat
thinking, and swooped round her head in circles. She cast her eye up
towards the ceiling. There were one, two, three nests hanging from it,
and another just begu n. “I am getting ver y careless about my work,”
she said to herself. “But how can one work when one is in such miser y
and anxiet y. Oh, Agha, Agha,” she groaned, “how is this all to end?
What is to become of you, and what is to become of me? What shall we
do? What is the use of our closing our eyes and deceiving ourselves? It
cannot be long now before the plans are hatched, the net woven that is
to ensnare you, and what will that mean to me?” She shivered as she
alwa ys did when she thought of Mohamed Jan.